Is The Human Centipede the sickest sci-fi film ever made?

Fri, May 07, 2010 9:30am

I've seen plenty of the sickest SF films in existence, including ones with exploding body parts, alien rapes and worse, but none of them beats this odd scientific human experiment that this weirdo German doctor describes to his victim in chilling detail.

Pulling out charts as his victims are strapped to hospital beds, Dr. Heiter, played by Dieter Laser, explains in chilling, cool, Nazi-like detachment how he is going to create a creature by joining one person to another, creating a continuous food passage.

"I will connect the anus to the mouth," he says as he shows his horrified audience crude charts and explains how he has done the experiment already on his three dogs, now buried in the backyard.

Dr. Heiter has kidnapped two female American tourists who have come to his door after getting a flat tire, and he has picked up a Japanese man (Akihiro Kitamura, from Heroes) who can speak neither English nor German. When one of the women tries to escape a few times and fights back against the doctor, he determines that she will be the unlucky person in the middle of the monster he plans to create.

The doctor is like a tight-lipped Peter Cushing who toys with his prey before he snaps off their heads.

He pulls out the women's teeth one by one because he going to make the Japanese man the head. Then he sews, with metal staples, the lips of the women to the hindquarters of the person in front, slicing the bottoms to fit them together.

When the victims wake up in their new creature form, they are treated like a freaky dog, made to eat from a dog bowl and beaten with a riding crop. Like a veterinarian, the doctor analyzes each segment, noting that the middle one is constipated and the last one is starving.

Dutch filmmaker Tom Six says he is influenced by U.S. horror films, and he wanted to make the most horrific one ever. He also says that he has plans for a sequel featuring a 12-person human centipede that will make this one look like "My Little Pony."

The question is, after the shock of this one, who could possibly want to sit through more?

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Some called The Human Centipede the sickest sci-fi movie ever made. Just in case you've forgotten (hey, watching it WAS traumatic), the film was about a doctor who sewed together six people end to end to create (how shall we put this delicately?) a single continuous food passage. But for director Tom Six, that wasn't sick ENOUGH.